Forty-eight sculptures now rise from the ruins of a 1930s pavilion at Haleʻiwa Beach Park, the final stop for a citywide art project that spent nearly two years tracing Oʻahu’s hidden histories back to the surface. The City and County of Honolulu Mayor’s Office of Culture and the Arts opened the installation last Friday, closing out a series that began at Fort Street Mall in downtown Honolulu. Carved by artists Amber Khan and Jordan Souza, the sculptures tell the story of Laniwahine, an aliʻi moʻo described as a shape-shifting water guardian who guards and sustains the ʻUkoʻa and Loko Ea fishponds of Waialua.
The project, called Wahi Pana: Storied Places, is described by its organizers as a temporary public art initiative that connects sites across Oʻahu with their Native Hawaiian moʻolelo, according to wahipana.com. It launched in 2025 and is scheduled to run through 2028, funded by up to $1 million from Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Public Art Challenge, which selected Honolulu as one of eight winning cities nationwide. As Aloha State Daily reports, the sculptures at Haleʻiwa rest on pillars that once supported the old beach park pavilion, grounding the new artwork literally in the bones of the old structure.
A Moʻolelo Pulled From Old Newspapers and Living Memory
The Laniwahine installation draws on archival Hawaiian-language newspaper records from 1870 to 1885, translated by Paige Okamura, combined with talk-story sessions with Waialua community members, according to colouramber.com. That research places Puaʻena in Waialua as the first landing site of the moʻo clan in the Hawaiian archipelago, with the installation depicting moʻo arriving at Puaʻena Point before processing across the islands in pairs, per Aloha State Daily’s reporting.
Okamura, a member of the Honolulu Commission on Culture and the Arts who grew up in Waialua, researched and translated the moʻolelo using those newspapers and conversations with community members. She pointed to several threads tying the story to the land itself: Puaʻena Point, the Loko Ea fishpond, her grandfather David Anana’s stewardship of the area, and the name Alamuki appearing on a family land document. Okamura said public art succeeds when the community recognizes itself in and invests in the art, adding that the installation is meant for generational residents to see the stories and places they grew up with.
Community Voices Behind the Project
Jennifer Santos, executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Culture and the Arts, said the installation represents what the community can do together, and that it reclaims the space while continuing care and aloha ʻāina for it. She said she hopes the installation gives visitors a mindful, guided connection to what lies beneath the surface. The project involved community feedback on the artists’ plans and preliminary renderings before the sculptures were finalized…